Liquid display devices as display devices have been widely used across the industrial fields, and have been increasingly applied for uses in mobile terminals by utilizing their advantages such as thinness and low power consumption.
Recently, in conjunction with the spread of equipment with liquid crystal display devices, downsizing and reduction in thickness thereof have been increasingly demanded. There are flexible substrates that realize this demand.
In the recent trend of accelerating downsizing and reductions in thickness of products, as such a flexible substrate, for example, as described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-133756, there is known a flexible substrate which is folded back from a liquid crystal panel that is a liquid crystal display element as a display element to the back side of the liquid crystal panel and fixed, for example, to a light guide plate of a backlight or a metal frame covering the liquid crystal panel.
A flexible substrate is connected between the liquid crystal panel side and an external circuit which inputs image signals, etc., into the liquid crystal panel, so that this flexible substrate must be provided with a connecting portion for connection to the external circuit.
However, in the above-described display device, the flexible substrate is fixed in a state that it is folded back to the back side of the liquid crystal panel, so that if the connecting portion is provided on the tip end side of the flexible substrate, the flexible substrate folded back must be folded back again with respect to the liquid crystal panel so as to project to the outside of the liquid crystal panel, and this applies a stress to the flexible substrate.
The present invention has been made in view of this problem, and an object thereof is to provide a display device which can connect a display element to an external circuit without applying an excessively great stress to the flexible substrate.